The World vs. SARS-CoV-2, 4/6
Panama is quarantining women and men on different days during its coronavirus lockdown
Around the world, seismologists are observing a lot less ambient seismic noise — meaning, the vibrations generated by cars, trains, buses and people going about their daily lives. And in the absence of that noise, Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less. [CNN]
What NASA is doing to keep COVID-19 off the space station
Several dogs and cats have tested positive to COVID-19 virus following close contact with infected humans. Studies are underway to better understand the susceptibility of different animal species to the COVID-19 virus and to assess infection dynamics in susceptible animal species. Currently, there is no evidence to suggest that animals infected by humans are playing a role in the spread of COVID-19. Human outbreaks are driven by person to person contact. [World Organisation for Animal Health]
A tiger at the Bronx Zoo tests positive for the coronavirus, and other big cats there appear ill.
In some regions of the country, non-coronavirus deaths were rising at an alarming rate alongside confirmed COVID-19 deaths — the total death count was up as much as sixfold from previous years. Those deaths officially attributed to the coronavirus accounted for barely a quarter of the increase. […] How many “excess deaths” are patients who have COVID-19 but haven’t been diagnosed with it, and how many are patients with other illnesses who can’t get proper treatment in overwhelmed hospital systems? […] In Bergamo, a city northeast of Milan, about 20 percent of all family physicians have been infected. [NY mag]
30 million Americans could lose their private health insurance over the next few months
American Indians have the highest rates of diseases that make covid-19 more lethal. Conditions in Indian Country are ripe for a rapid spread of the coronavirus. Rates of infection among Navajos is a major concern.
Gates said he was picking the top seven vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time in serially saying, ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,” he said. [Business Insider]
How Taiwan has kept the virus under control
Some countries’ first impulses are to cover up the spread of the disease. We look at a few of those efforts, plus some brutal methods of enforcing stay-at-home orders. [Slate]
Every day, millions of people around the world type their health symptoms into Google. We can use these searches to help detect unknown Covid-19 outbreaks, particularly in parts of the world with poor testing infrastructure. […] There is now strong evidence that anosmia, or loss of smell, is a symptom of Covid-19, with some estimates suggesting that 30-60 percent of people with the disease experience this symptom. In the United States, in the week ending this past Saturday, searches for “I can’t smell” were highest in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Michigan — four of the states with the highest prevalence of Covid-19. […] Searches for “no puedo oler” (“I can’t smell”) are some 10 times higher per Google search in Ecuador than they are in Spain, even though Ecuador officially reports more than ten times fewer Covid-19 cases per capita than Spain does. Ecuadorians are also right near the top in searches for fever, chills and diarrhea. […] searches for “non sento odori” (“I can’t smell”) were elevated in Italy days before the symptom was reported in the news. […] The three searches most related to Covid-19 disease rates were not a surprise: loss of smell, fever and chills. The fifth and sixth searches weren’t much of a surprise either: nasal congestion and diarrhea, which have also received a lot of attention as Covid-19 symptoms. However, the fourth-place search was a surprise: eye pain, which has not garnered much attention as a possible symptom of the disease. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz | NY Times
Report showed 43,000 fewer health-care jobs in mid-March than in mid-February. Hospital employment was almost precisely flat between the two months, but dental offices reported 17,000 fewer workers and doctors’ offices had 12,000 fewer. Since about three times as many Americans work in doctors’ offices as in dentists’ offices, that’s an especially hard hit to dental employment, which makes sense: Most dental services are not emergencies, and dental work creates significant risk of exposure to coronavirus. […] “There are jobs that people decided wouldn’t be affected by coronavirus because they could be done remotely, but those jobs are dependent on people paying for those services.” All that job loss across the economy means less spending power in households and at businesses. And that may mean less business even for enterprises that can adjust to the stay-at-home orders and keep doing business. [NY mag]
trapped in an eternal honeymoon in the Maldives
Berlin’s drug dealers adapt to life under coronavirus lockdown [Finacial Times | unlocked]
